environment

A few years in the making, this investigative documentary film explores the unintended environmental, health and social consequences of our addiction to our digital devices. Veteran filmmaker Sue Williams presents the other, ugly side of the electronics industry, which may sound as clean as a biotech lab. I helped with the film as a China producer, and went with a camera to China’s e-waste capital, Guiyu in Guangdong Province.

Poster of documentary film “Death By Design” by Sue Williams, for which I was a China producer. Click/Tap for Facebook page.

The environmental cost of China’s breakneck development can be witnessed across the smoggy skylines of its megacities. But not all of China’s environmental problems are so visually apparent, from soils contaminated by cadmium and arsenic, to diminishing groundwater supplies unfit for drinking. The films in this series of Chinese environmental documentaries make visible some of the hidden consequences of China’s rapid growth and the people fighting to save their communities and livelihoods.

The series of film events were featured in the New York Times and received sold out crowds for all the nights. It has been one of the best attended film series at Asia Society. Here below is the trailer for the series:

Last month the Asia Society began a film series with Waking the Green Tiger, a documentary about efforts to forestall the flooding of villages in pursuit of a dam at Yunnan province’s Tiger Leaping Gorge. I met Chinese producer Shi Lihong, who was in New York for the event.

Over the past three decades, China has dazzled the rest of the world with its stunning, high-speed economic growth. However, rapid urbanization, poverty reduction and transformation of city skylines have come at a grave price: air and water pollution, degraded forests, pasturelands and marine habitats, growing greenhouse gas emissions and a host of other environmental problems.

China Green has been documenting China’s environmental issues now and for years to come and will strive to serve as a web forum where people with an interest in China and its environmental challenges can find interesting visual stories and share critical information about the most populous nation in the world whose participation in the solution to global environmental problems, such as climate change, will be indispensable.

… the China Green project at the Asia Society, based in New York City but with a sizable presence in Hong Kong, has been tracking the mainland’s worsening environmental plight. As managing editor/producer of the project, Michael Zhao leads the effort to keep tabs and encourage reforms.